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With Toronto mayor John Tory declaring traffic congestion Public Enemy Number 1, a local app developer has been inspired to help. Michael McArthur, along with business partner Gregory Meloche and a small group of developers, has created Towit, which harnesses crowdsourcing to point out illegally parked cars to the authorities.

“It was just kind of a hare-brained thought that we decided to roll with it, and the more we did, the bigger it seems to get,” says McArthur. “I read an article that my old boss posted on Facebook, with him commenting something along the lines of ‘Every time I see one of those paper shredders parked on a busy street I wonder why it is not being towed,’ and the idea just hit me.”

The real meat of the development happened over the past week two weeks, with Towit launching Friday on the Google Play store, and versions coming soon to iOS, BlackBerry and Windows Phone.

When an app user sees a parking offender, they can take a photo of the vehicle, including the license plate, which is then uploaded onto Towit’s website; if parking authorities are monitoring the site, they can act. McArthur says he was inspired by people already doing this online, in a move that is often hashtagged with “parking shaming.”

But “we don’t really want to use the word ‘shaming,’ ” he says, “because it’s more effective than that. We’re actually towing the people, trying to get them out of there and solve the problem.”

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McArthur cites a number of benefits to his app’s approach. He believes that if both the police and tow truck drivers monitor the site, they can meet at the parked car at roughly the same time, rather than having the police respond first, followed by a truck, with the officer having to return and check the car’s condition before it can be towed. As well, he believes the data collected can keep track of repeat offenders, as well as locating problem areas that need to be monitored. “I want to give this data to the city,” he says.

One key to any crowdsourced app is getting enough people using it, but he doesn’t believe that will be a problem.

“People are frustrated and want to solve this problem. Like cyclists that are mad at people parking in bike lanes, those are pissed off people that actually don’t need any more incentive than ‘I am going to do this, I am going to report this person, and hopefully he will never do this again,’ ” he says. “That’s all it takes. And we have hundreds of interested people already.”

Since the app launched on Friday evening, people have already started to upload pictures of alleged parking offenders from the weekend.

McArthur says he has met with the some of the mayor’s staff, and has also reached out Traffic Services, who have contacted him to discuss the app. “I am offering the police a free solution, with no cost to them and no cost to the taxpayers, that is just going to make them more efficient, which in turn will save them or make them more money, so I can’t understand why they would say no to such a thing unless they are against innovation.”

Constable Clinton Stibbe, media officer for Toronto Traffic Services, says they are looking at the app. “He has reached out to us, but we have not seen it, so we actually know very little about it. We are in the process of arranging a meeting with him in order to access its viability, but that’s basically it,” says Stibbe.

He does voice concerns, mostly surrounding the fact that most citizens don’t know the intricacies of parking bylaws. As well, any photo of a car would require some proof the violation, like surrounding signage.

“How do we know that someone is illegally parked? That’s the basic question that has to be asked,” says Stibbe. “There are many exceptions in the parking bylaws that officers are trained to interpret what is and what is not permitted. So we have to look at everything.

“First off, when was (the picture) taken? Is there a picture of the signage? Because each are very valid, and in fact critical, points that need to be included.”

McArthur would ideally like buy-in from the police and the city to make his app effective, and thinks he might have a global business opportunity. He says there are several options the company is considering to make money, from making Towit a paid app to including advertising on its site or claiming a finder’s fee charge from tow trucks. He understands that his app could be seen as another weapon in what former mayor Rob Ford called “the war on the car,” but he says that’s not the case.

“This is not an anti-car movement by any means. I know it may seem that way to the public, I’m a downtown cyclist and I really don’t care what they think,” he says. “We are trying to solve a problem that impacts tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands people in our city, every day.”

Even one of the people who was caught up in city’s ticketing blitz doesn’t think it is bad idea. Two weeks ago, Jeremy Swampillai got a $150 ticket at Richmond and John while dropping his son off at daycare.

“I got burned, but I was doing something stupid and was there for a long time,” admits Swampillai. “I probably could have got towed. But as an entrepreneur, I think that this is a great idea, and living downtown, to be honest, I would probably use it to report people too.”

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